Marry Ex's Billionaire Uncle After Divorce (Aurora and Jasper) novel Chapter 255

(Aurora’s POV)

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The touch had caught me completely off guard. My heart stumbled – actually stumbled – and I felt heat climb up the back of my neck. I shifted slightly toward my side of the seat.

“I wasn’t upset with anyone,” I said. More firmly this time.

He didn’t push it.

He simply reached over and took my hand. His fingers folded around mine, palm to palm, and stayed there – warm and unhurried and entirely certain of themselves. He didn’t say anything else. He just held on.

The car swept down the long driveway of the estate and came to a stop. Only then did he let go.

We stepped out into the quiet night air.

Inside, our hands separated. I murmured something vague about needing the bathroom and made my exit before he could say anything else.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at myself.

My cheeks were faintly pink. My thoughts were going in six directions at once.

I kept turning it over – the star–lit ceiling he’d built for a single offhand sentence I’d said two weeks ago.

The way he noticed things. The way he’d looked at me in the car. Was any of it really about me? Or was I just standing in the shape of someone else – someone he’d once chased across an ocean and never quite gotten over?

I told myself to stop.

One year. That was the arrangement. It had a beginning and it had an end, and reading too much into any of it was exactly the kind of mistake I couldn’t afford. I repeated it until the tightness in my chest began to ease.

(Author’s POV)

Two days had passed, and Martha had gone completely silent.

Sienna had been watching her phone with an impatience that was curdling fast into something uglier. She was not going to stand by and watch Aurora settle into the Everett family without doing something about it.

Martha had just finished making breakfast when the call came through. She recognized the number immediately, and her stomach tightened.

Sienna was her daughter – her actual daughter – but there had never been anything soft between them. No warmth. No real tenderness. Just complaints, and demands, and the particular exhaustion of loving someone who only ever took. Still, blood was blood. No matter how toxic it had always been, Martha couldn’t bring herself to cut Sienna off entirely. Not the way she’d eventually hardened herself, over years and with effort, toward Aurora.